


Life is Calling

by Flora (florahart)



Category: Green Day - 21st Century Breakdown (Album)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 04:39:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/florahart/pseuds/Flora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This was a real-last-minute pinch, and is maybe somewhat more literal with the album's imagery than you might have wanted; I hope it suits anyway.</p></blockquote>





	Life is Calling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FairestCat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FairestCat/gifts).



"You ought to be an artist."

Her mother told her that a long time ago, watching her apply careful even strokes of eyeliner to her lower lid in the mirror over the pink ceramic pedestal sink. Gloria has the brown skin of her father and her mother's green eyes, an unusual combination that's striking and gets her a lot of attention with or without the smoky line of black intensifying the borders. The year she was fourteen, she argued for the right to wear mascara, and once that battle was in hand, she'd simply added lip gloss, then eyeliner and powder, and it never came up. She knew her mother worried, but what was going to happen, she would have asked, if pressed. What was going to happen?

Her mother would have smiled and told her it was a mother's job to worry. Gloria would have said--no, felt; she wouldn't have known how to articulate the feeling--that it made her powerful, the ability to seize attention and hold it with a fluttered last or a dimpled smile. Her mother probably knew that.

Those moments, with Mamá sitting on the folding footstool that neither of them ever used for reaching, watching her run that pencil just above her lower lashes, that's what she thinks of now as she quickly layers colors, paint that's sprayed onto the sides of trains and buildings only to be sprayed over or sandblasted away. It's nearly as temporary as any paint on her face, but it's just as powerful and she knows the message will get across, cutting through the static for those who want to see, and that's the whole point.

She doubts her mother would be _proud_, exactly; tagging buildings was surely not the kind of art she ever meant. But then, maybe she would. Gloria's mother never lost faith, or if she did, Gloria never knew it. It doesn't matter. The black outline separates white letters and numbers, and then she's done, spray-cans tossed away to roll up against the chain links.

The message has been passed, and she has work early, so she's heading home for bed. She stops at the cracked sink--still pink, still a pedestal, but the crack isn't hurting anything and it's been a long time since they had the money to replace fixtures for purely aesthetic reasons--and washes her face--another legacy of her mother, whose voice she can hear every night when she picks up the yellow soap and the scent of it drifts up. "You wash your face, Gloria. You won't sleep good if you don't."

Her cloth is old and soft, and the smell of the soap and the feel of the damp heat on her face form a habit she's glad she never lost. She's convinced it does help her 'sleep good,' even if it's just that she thinks so that makes the difference.

It's foggy by the time she's ready for bed; the air out the barred window is spooky with diffracted moonlight whose source is completely obscured. Gloria brings up the blanket and rests on her back, closing her eyes for minutes at a time and then forgetting and opening them to look again at the fog.

A little while after two, she turns on her side away from the window and reaches for the radio. She expects to have to choose between angry talk radio--people calling in to outdo each other with unfounded rhetoric and paranoia--and tinny distant tunes nearly swallowed whole by static, but instead, with only a moment of fiddling with the dial, there's music coming in clearly, uninterrupted, mellow and sweet and played by people who love pitch and rhythm and understand the power they can build.

It takes a long time for her to realize she's fallen asleep. No one plays sweet melodies any more, and no one remembers how to listen to them anyway.

The fog is still thick and rolls in slow drifts around her feet when she leaves the house for work, and the streets around her are eerie-dark with the moon nearly past the horizon. The music left when she opened her eyes, but she tries, as she walks briskly, the safe pace between comfortable and worried, to hold onto snatches of it that soothe her heart and work to slow her pace. Her feet want to tap out the same rhythm she hears in her head, the one she imagines the man walking just ahead of her must hear too, because his feet keep perfect time.

Maybe she's going crazy. It wouldn't be the first time, and it's always temporary. She always returns to reality soon enough.

She arrives at work with three minutes to spare and pours herself a cup of coffee in the kitchen. It's too hot, and it scalds her tongue, but she feels grateful for the odd feeling it makes. Scalding is just as real as music, and if it's less pleasant, at least it's nothing she's dreamed.

By the end of the day, the music has gone entirely, and she walks unwarmed to check for replies to last night's message. It means skirting a field she'd rather avoid, but she likes that better than waiting for someone to come to her. There's no reply, but it's early yet, the sun just setting, the sky falling into rusty-red shades that she can't help but feel are following her like cheap mascara in tear tracks. She turns toward home, crossing the street to avoid a group of children spouting nonsense at each other, nonsense they've heard from their parents or on the radio, the slogans of conspiracy written by men who understand how to vandalize a million minds with one clever half-truth, and follow up with a bald-faced lie to smash the remaining clear windows. When it's adults that she hears on the streets they make her angry. When it's kids, they just make her sad, all their natural passion twisted and misdirected.

Sometimes she thinks it _would_ be better to just allow the system to burn. Innocents would be caught, and that's the part she can't get past, but she remembers driving past a post-inferno forest once (long ago, before lies and promises were the same thing) and how shoots of green were sprouting even while pockets still smoldered under the ruins.

Hope is a hard thing to hold onto while it lifts her high and simultaneously crushes her all over again. It keeps calling, and she keeps answering with her paints and her heart, but every time it happens, she's less sure she wants to remember what the truth looks like. The truth is sharp, broken, and if she has to bleed, it's easier to just lie down and let the heartbeats ebb.

The unmaintained sidewalk (no one takes responsibility) drops off and she's not paying attention; she winds up on her knees. Nothing tears but her pride, though there will be a bruise there tomorrow, green like her eyes and the paint on the walls.

The hand up is unexpected and warm, and she feels the beating pulse in her throat as she looks up, half expecting, half _wanting_ to find the smile behind the eyes is false; it would be easier. But no; the eyes are warm, the crinkles at the corners telling. She can't see the other features of her rescuer, bundled as he (she?) is behind a muffler, hood pulled in tight, but the voice coming through the scarf is low and gentle. "You ought to be an artist."

Gloria doesn't wear makeup any more (painted messages aren't for hiding behind, and Mamá is long gone), and the statement is out of context and can't have been deliberate, but it warms her like music and like truth. It takes her breath away. "What makes you say that?" She doesn't flutter her eyelashes, doesn't flirt; it's an honest and curious question.

"You still want to make a difference. Sing us a song."

Her stranger vanishes as the fog starts to roll back in, as the children across the street disperse into a dozen unwelcoming homes, and Gloria is left standing, thinking about paint and power, about dignity and destruction, about purpose and propaganda and perception.

Her chest hurts, her heart beating too hard, and she knows now: the fires are coming. When they burn out, she will still be standing.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a real-last-minute pinch, and is maybe somewhat more literal with the album's imagery than you might have wanted; I hope it suits anyway.


End file.
